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I've never heard of Meta, so, like any normal human being I went on their website. [1] TLDR: From a glance, this entire organization's existence is centered ar

by tabeth 10y ago

I've never heard of Meta, so, like any normal human being I went on their website. [1] TLDR: From a glance, this entire organization's existence is centered around the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. There's no indication of anything useful they've done for real. I'm sure I could find that information if I bothered to look more, but for an organization that describes themselves as "mission-driven", and one that is "working on problems that matter," I fail to see any of those problems, or how this organization has contributed to the solution. I mean, not even a link to "Solutions" or "Mission" or "About". Nada. I'm very curious to how this page looked [yesterday]. Organizations that actually do stuff don't hesitate to put it front and center of their website, for example: - https://www.change.org/ https://www.change.org/ - https://www.planet.com/ https://www.planet.com/ This is literally a sentence by sentence breakdown of everything on Meta.com at the time of this posting. > "Most scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by the invention of new tools that help us see and experiment in new ways." Great! Oh, this is just a quote from Mark Zuckerberg, linking to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. OK. Moving along. > Meta is joining the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. OK, got it. There's a bunch of corporate speak that you'll see if you click it. I won't click it because I want to know what Meta does outside of the whole CZI thing. > Reserve a free account > Meta is a tool that helps researchers understand what is happening globally in science and shows them where science is headed. Pending shareholder and court approval, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta to help bring its technologies to the entire scientific community. Sign up now to reserve your free account. Neat! If you go to https://meta.science/reserve https://meta.science/reserve, where you actually can reserve you'll see more CZI stuff. Again, there's no indication of what these people do, in practice. > Join a mission-driven organization working on problems that matter Awesome! Oh, wait, this is just a link to their hiring page. What exactly do these people do, specifically? Sure they "help researchers understand what is happening globally", but that's so vague. Google and Wikipedia technically do that too in a way. [1] http://meta.com/ http://meta.com/

cing 10y ago
I've had an account at Meta prior to this announcement. The statement "Meta is a tool that helps researchers understand what is happening globally in science and shows them where science is headed" is not wrong, even though the landing page could use some work. What that amounts to for a researcher is a paper discovery service. You can search for papers/labs, and click on topics like "CRISPR/Cas9" and get the top 20 most impactful papers in the last decade using that technique. You can subscribe to new papers on that topic across a large set of journals. You can also observe trends in science, like certain research concepts that are increasing in popularity. In practice, as a researcher, I don't find it more useful than journal RSS feeds and a Google Scholar alert or two, but it's a step in the right direction.
- llukas 10y ago
  For you maybe it is not for Meta it is goldmine of data who gets interested in what etc. This may be good idea but if data was open.
dougmccune 10y ago
It looks like the entire site changed for this announcement, and now it's not much more than the announcement. Prior to that change there was a lot more information about the products Meta offers. They were building a number of products powered by some machine learning built on top of academic papers. There was the consumer-oriented tool for paper recommendations targeted at academic researchers. Then an "impact prediction" tool that was designed to try to forecast the importance of a new manuscript, which was marketed to academic journal publishers and private industry (like R&D departments of pharma companies). And then there was what they called "Horizon Scanning", which is another prediction tool to try to forecast which areas of research or scientific methods/techniques were going to be rising in popularity/importance over the coming years (ie try to identify CRISPR a few years before it blows up), also mostly targeting private R&D firms but also grant-funding bodies, gov't entities, etc. Post CZI acquisition I bet they're doing a full revamp of what they're bringing to market, so I guess they're just pulling all the content down first before they figure out how to rebrand.
elastic_church 10y ago
Did you notice that its also a great way to get bought out? All you need is one client. Solve a problem for that client and make it cheaper for them to acquire you than keep paying you.
macandcheese 10y ago
Well, if you bothered to click on the second link that you for some reason didn't want to because of "corporate speak" - the associated Facebook post explains pretty clearly what Meta does. > "Meta’s tools can dramatically accelerate scientific progress and move us closer to our goal: to support science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century. Meta will help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field is headed. The potential for this kind of platform is virtually limitless: a researcher could use Meta to help identify emerging techniques for understanding coronary artery disease; a graduate student could see that two different diseases activate the same immune defense pathway; and clinicians could find scientists working on the most promising Zika treatments sooner. In the long run, it could be extended to other areas of knowledge: for example, it could help educators stay up to date on developmental science to better understand how children learn."
- edgarvaldes 10y ago
  This is the key point, but still vague, I think. >help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field is headed.
- metaphorm 10y ago
  oh well when you put it that way... a platform with virtually limitless potential. WOW WOW WOW WOW! limitless. potential. why didn't you just say that in the first place? all my potentials have been limited so far. finally something with limitless potential.
  - randycupertino 10y ago
    Meta: We're like zombo.com, but for research.
bbctol 10y ago
They updated their site for the acquisition... Meta's been around for years, it wasn't just created (it was named Sciencescape until last year). They curate papers for scientific researchers, use some NLP and more specialized algorithms than general Google to do a better job. If you're only hearing about them now, you're probably not their target audience?

by tabeth 10y ago

cing 10y ago

I've had an account at Meta prior to this announcement. The statement "Meta is a tool that helps researchers understand what is happening globally in science and shows them where science is headed" is not wrong, even though the landing page could use some work. What that amounts to for a researcher is a paper discovery service. You can search for papers/labs, and click on topics like "CRISPR/Cas9" and get the top 20 most impactful papers in the last decade using that technique. You can subscribe to new papers on that topic across a large set of journals. You can also observe trends in science, like certain research concepts that are increasing in popularity. In practice, as a researcher, I don't find it more useful than journal RSS feeds and a Google Scholar alert or two, but it's a step in the right direction.

llukas 10y ago
For you maybe it is not for Meta it is goldmine of data who gets interested in what etc. This may be good idea but if data was open.

dougmccune 10y ago

It looks like the entire site changed for this announcement, and now it's not much more than the announcement. Prior to that change there was a lot more information about the products Meta offers. They were building a number of products powered by some machine learning built on top of academic papers. There was the consumer-oriented tool for paper recommendations targeted at academic researchers. Then an "impact prediction" tool that was designed to try to forecast the importance of a new manuscript, which was marketed to academic journal publishers and private industry (like R&D departments of pharma companies). And then there was what they called "Horizon Scanning", which is another prediction tool to try to forecast which areas of research or scientific methods/techniques were going to be rising in popularity/importance over the coming years (ie try to identify CRISPR a few years before it blows up), also mostly targeting private R&D firms but also grant-funding bodies, gov't entities, etc. Post CZI acquisition I bet they're doing a full revamp of what they're bringing to market, so I guess they're just pulling all the content down first before they figure out how to rebrand.

elastic_church 10y ago

Did you notice that its also a great way to get bought out? All you need is one client. Solve a problem for that client and make it cheaper for them to acquire you than keep paying you.

macandcheese 10y ago

Well, if you bothered to click on the second link that you for some reason didn't want to because of "corporate speak" - the associated Facebook post explains pretty clearly what Meta does. > "Meta’s tools can dramatically accelerate scientific progress and move us closer to our goal: to support science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century. Meta will help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field is headed. The potential for this kind of platform is virtually limitless: a researcher could use Meta to help identify emerging techniques for understanding coronary artery disease; a graduate student could see that two different diseases activate the same immune defense pathway; and clinicians could find scientists working on the most promising Zika treatments sooner. In the long run, it could be extended to other areas of knowledge: for example, it could help educators stay up to date on developmental science to better understand how children learn."

edgarvaldes 10y ago
This is the key point, but still vague, I think. >help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field is headed.
metaphorm 10y ago
oh well when you put it that way... a platform with virtually limitless potential. WOW WOW WOW WOW! limitless. potential. why didn't you just say that in the first place? all my potentials have been limited so far. finally something with limitless potential.
- randycupertino 10y ago
  Meta: We're like zombo.com, but for research.

bbctol 10y ago

They updated their site for the acquisition... Meta's been around for years, it wasn't just created (it was named Sciencescape until last year). They curate papers for scientific researchers, use some NLP and more specialized algorithms than general Google to do a better job. If you're only hearing about them now, you're probably not their target audience?